As you know we shipped PernixData FVP 3.0 version yesterday, but what you might not know is that we also shipped PernixData FVP Freedom Edition. This in my opinion is an exciting addition to the product family and based on the feedback we have already received it’s taking off in a major way!! Keep in mind this is totally free software with no restrictions or time limits.

For those unfamiliar with the Freedom Edition I have outlined the supported features that come with this release.

If you want DFTM-Z (Memory Compression) or the ability to configure Write Back for your virtual machines then you can easily upgrade to our standard and enterprise licensing options.

Freedom Community ForumWe are launching with the Freedom edition a brand new community forum. This is to provide support and collaboration among the Freedom users. As you might guess, we are planning to add a lot of content over the next few weeks, so the more questions or interaction you have on the forum, the more it will make it useful for the Freedom community. In order to access this forum, you can visit https://community.pernixdata.com and click sign-in. We have enabled SSO support, so all you have to use is your same PernixData download portal account and we will redirect you back into the community forum.

If you haven’t already requested the Freedom edition, you can request access here. Once registered you will automatically receive an email with instructions on how to gain access to the software and portal. This is totally an automated process, so you will get your Freedom license key the same day you request it!!

I'm excited once again to be hosting guest blogger Bala Narasimhan VP of Products at PernixData. He will be doing a new series dedicated to Infrastructure Level In Memory Computing. This is a new way to think and design your environment for the future. Enjoy!

In Memory Computing (IMC) has seen a revival in recent years. In this blog post we will walk down memory lane (no pun intended) and study the evolution of IMC. We will specifically focus on the role of IMC in conjunction with storage systems.

Here’s a quick timeline capturing the evolution of IMC.

IMC initially manifested itself as buffer caches in operating systems and databases. Buffer caches remain integral parts of these software systems to date. A buffer cache is a read cache for most recently accessed data. A hit in the buffer cache makes reads go faster because it avoids a disk access. Writes however must be synchronized with the underlying datastore. This means a buffer cache help with reads but never help with writes. In Memory Databases (IMDB) that hold all of the data in memory for faster query processing were first introduced in 1990s but didn’t make much of a dent. Recently IMDB have seen a revival and have become an important discussion topic in the database industry. One of the reasons for this revival has been the dramatic increase in the amount of RAM that servers can hold; surpassing a terabyte of RAM per server. IMDB, like buffer caches, work well for reads but require synchronization with a persistent media for writes and therefore incur performance penalties. The early 2000’s saw the introduction of memory caching libraries such as Memcached that allow applications to leverage the performance of RAM as a cache within the application logic. Application owners, via API, can invoke these libraries at well defined locations to use RAM as a cache. Unfortunately, any change in the underlying memory caching libraries or to the application behavior would mean a rewrite of the application altogether.

All of these approaches leverage RAM as a volatile cache. This means all these approaches are read caches and only accelerate parts of an application, if at all. More importantly, all of these approaches push the in memory computing into the application. This has a number of unfortunate side effects:

Applications become unnecessarily complicated. They have to maintain complicated caching logic and ensure consistency with the backing store.

The onus is now on the end user to figure out how best to leverage IMC. Everything from determining the appropriate buffer cache size to deciding which tables to pin in RAM is now an application owner decision.

The application owners do not always control the infrastructure on which the application is deployed. It is therefore unfortunate that they must decide how much memory an application should use for caching without understanding how the infrastructure (for example, servers) are going to be used and will evolve. In addition, applications owners do not always have a holistic view of other applications are running on the same server.

Leveraging memory management innovations become challenging. NUMA is a good example of an innovation that cannot be leveraged until an application is enhanced to leverage it even though NUMA itself is an infrastructure level innovation.

All of this has meant that the strengths of RAM as a data layer have not been fully exploited. While this may not have been an issue until now because most servers had only little amounts of RAM, say 32GB or 64GB, this is quickly changing. Servers with terabytes of RAM are not uncommon these days and this trend is only going to continue. The time has therefore come to rethink IMC from the ground up. Enhancing applications to do better read caching and putting the onus on the end user is not the answer. Future blog posts in this series will introduce a high performance, highly scalable way to leverage IMC across one’s entire infrastructure.

PernixData introduced yesterday a revolutionary step forward in storage performance with the release of PernixData FVP 2.0. Several innovative features were revealed and a technology first was dropped on the industry. Frank Denneman has already started a great series on some of the new features. As to not let him have all the fun, I will also be covering some aspects to this new version as well!

The first big reveal was FVP transforming itself into an all-encompassing platform for storage optimization. Adding NFS & DAS to the already supported iSCSi, FC, FCOE list; which now completes all available connectivity options for VMware environments.

NFS support is obviously a welcome treat for many. It’s the support of local disk that might actually surprise some. Optimizing DAS environments I think will provide some unique cases for customers. (Future Post Coming) However keep in mind that supporting DAS doesn’t mean it voids use cases for VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance) software. PernixData is only accelerating the reads and writes, so if you require data services, then you may need to look at a VSA type of solution for your underlying local data at rest tier.